Pearl Kendrick and Grace Eldering: Saving Children’s Lives

by Linda Harris Sittig

While there is a current controversy over vaccinations, there was a time in our not-so-distant past when a vaccination could mean the difference between life and death for a young child.

EARLY HISTORY OF VACCINES

We currently think about the Covid vaccine, but vaccines have a much longer history. One of the earliest was Edward Jenner’s vaccine against smallpox in 1798. Louis Pasteur’s vaccine against rabies followed in 1885. Diphtheria, cholera, and typhoid vaccines came around the beginning of 1900. By the late 1920s, vaccines existed against tetanus and tuberculosis. And the list went on well into the 1950s when Jonas Salk developed the vaccine against polio.

If you look at the list of lifesaving vaccines and their inventors, you will notice that all the scientists were men.

Until Pearl Kendrick and Grace Eldering.

They spent their careers studying bacterial infections and one in particular, the Bordetella Pertussis, more familiarly known as whooping cough.

Many of us have had the DPT vaccine against Diphtheria, Pertussis, and Tetanus. But in the early 1930s, Pertussis killed almost 7,000 Americans a year – mostly young children and infants. And it was a horrible disease where the victim coughed violently, fought to breathe, gasping for breath, and desperately gulped air into their lungs, producing a barking type sound –whooping cough.

And there was no cure.

PEARL AND GRACE

Pearl Kendrick was born in 1890 in New York and attended college at Syracuse University and Columbia. Her main area of interest was the study of bacteriology. After college, she tried her hand at teaching but did not feel drawn to that as a career.

At the end of World War I (post-1918), significant strides in controlling infectious diseases were making medical leaps and bounds. As a result, state public health departments began searching for educated men and women with science degrees who could staff their labs. But most men with health science degrees took research positions at universities where the pay was more lucrative than in state public health departments.

Whom did that leave? Women with science backgrounds.

Pearl Kendrick applied and worked for the New York State Department of Health. Then before 1926, she was recruited to work for the Michigan State Department of Health, headed by visionary Cy Young. By 1926 he had named her director of the newly opened laboratory in Grand Rapids.

Pearl received a doctorate in Public Health from Johns Hopkins and returned to Grand Rapids with the singular goal of eradicating Pertussis, which was in full throttle at the time.

Grace Eldering was born in 1900 in Montana, and after college graduation, she took a job as a teacher. Like Pearl, Grace soon realized that a career in education held little appeal, and in 1928 she relocated to Michigan to work in the state laboratory in Lansing. After a year, she transferred to the laboratory in Grand Rapids and met Pearl Kendrick.

The two women became a workhorse duo working with a team of doctors, nurses, and other researchers. At first, their goal was to develop procedures to diagnose Pertussis and limit its contagious possibilities sooner and more quickly.

But then, in November 1932, their laboratory identified a Pertussis specimen. They worked day and night and, by January, had developed their first experimental Pertussis vaccine. Then came the months and years of clinical trials to prove the worthiness of the vaccine and eliminate any potential dangers. They conducted study after study but were always short on funds.

It took the help of Eleanor Roosevelt, who paid the laboratory in Grand Rapids a visit in 1936. Funding for additional staff soon came from the Federal Works Progress Administration, and by 1944 the American Medical Association added Kendrick and Eldering’s Pertussis vaccine to the list of recommended immunizations.

THEIR LEGACY

Deaths from this dreaded childhood disease dropped dramatically. Where Pertussis once claimed 7,000 lives in one year, the statistics showed only ten deaths in the early 1970s.

Today approximately 85 percent of children worldwide now receive the Pertussis vaccine, usually in the combo of a DPT shot.

Neither Pearl Kendrick nor Grace Eldering became famous for their remarkable achievement. They used their scientific knowledge gained from their Johns Hopkins doctorates plus all their years in the field to continue researching how to eradicate infectious diseases.

Neither woman married, and they continued their professional and personal relationship until Pearl died in 1980. They had lived quiet lives, content with the knowledge that their efforts had saved thousands of children.

Unfortunately, Pertussis isn’t dead. It has again raised its ugly head in areas where people decline to take advantage of the vaccine.

 I am indebted to fellow writer Richard Conniff, whose excellent March 2022 Smithsonian Magazine article prompted my curiosity to research Pearl and Grace for Strong Women’s status. Here is the link to his article: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/unsung-heroes-ended-deadly-plague-180979547/. That article is excerpted from Conniff’s upcoming book, Ending Epidemics: A History of Escape from Contagion.

If you enjoyed learning about Pearl Kendrick and Grace Eldering and are not yet a follower of this blog, please sign up on the right sidebar. My Strong Women in History stories are published on the first of each month.

You can also find my novels about Strong Women and Strong Men in local bookstores and online. Cut From Strong Cloth, Last Curtain Call, Counting Crows, and B-29 DOWN. I am working now on a new novel set during World War II. Find updates on my website: www.lindasittig.com

~ Linda